K Allado-McDowell
On Neural Media
How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves?
In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain.
Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network.
What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence.
Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models.
Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.
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primer
K Allado-McDowell sees our culture as one erupting into a new age of creative practice: one of “neural media.” In their view, we are in the early days of a great technological and artistic shift flowering out of prior modes of broadcast and network culture — a shift fueled by new tools and phenomena like AI and generative media.
As a writer, artist, and technologist, K’s work actively explores the bounds of Neural Media as a form, seeking to identify both what we are able to create using this new paradigm and how it recursively shapes our own thinking and creative processes. Drawing on histories of design, technology, and culture, Allado-McDowell will reveal how previous media regimes shaped culture and subjectivity, and how neural media like AI now shape our perception, self-conception, and knowledge of reality. Against the backdrop of climate change and mass extinction, neural media present unique challenges and opportunities, which Allado-McDowell explores through their own work.
Why This Talk Matters Now
Over the past decade, the technological and creative potentials of artificial intelligence have become increasingly clear. The text and images produced by generative AI models have gone from science fiction to novelties to commonplace parts of the creative landscape.
When Allado-McDowell refers to “neural media,” they refer not just to generative AI but all forms of media based around networks of neurons (or mathematical abstractions modeling them, in the case of AI). As we engage with neural media, we interface not just with each individual node or neuron within the net, but the layers of meaning embedded in the connections between those points. In our encounter with artificial neural networks, we find ourselves — for our brains, too, are neural media — the first of their kind, but not the last.
The Long View
Neural Media is one of the three core frames through which Long Now Talks seek to understand our world in the long view. For more on these frames, read Long Now Board President Patrick Dowd’s introductory essay on Reframing the Future.
Allado-McDowell places their thinking in the context of media theorist Fred Turner’s work. Turner, who has previously given a Long Now Talk about Technology & Counterculture from World War II to Today, has written extensively about how new media technologies reshaped American and global culture over the course of the twentieth century. In The Democratic Surround and From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner identifies the shifts from the broadcast media of the early twentieth century to the network media of the 01980s and onwards. Allado-McDowell sees neural media as the successor to network media, a further emergence that builds upon the technocultural infrastructure of the twentieth century but is a phenomenon all its own.
Where to go next
- Read K Allado-McDowell’s essays on Designing Neural Media and Neural Interpellation in Gropius Bau.
- In MoMA’s Magazine, K Allado-McDowell explores the potential of AI as a poison — one that can be used to harm or to heal.
- Watch K Allado-McDowell’s TED talk on how Our Creative Relationship With AI Is Just Beginning.